The Body in the Back Room

Later, when people asked Edwin — and they asked him about that morning dozens of times, at the police station, in church, in the Crown, in his own kitchen — he never began with the body. He began with the lamp.

The lamp with the green shade was burning steadily, calmly, the way a lamp burns in the study of a man who has stepped out for a minute and will be back directly. Its light fell on the desk, on an open leather folder, on a pen with its cap off, on a sheet of blotting paper speckled with ink. Edwin took all this in during the first second and remembered it for ever, because it was the last ordinary thing he saw in that room.

And then he saw Oscar.

He was lying on the floor between the desk and the filing cabinet, on his side, one leg drawn up, as if he had fallen asleep from weariness. His pince-nez had flown off on its cord and lay beside him, one lens cracked. The grey hair at the back of his head was dark and wet. And a step from his outstretched hand, on the carpet, lay a bronze statuette — a little horse rearing on its hind legs — which for forty years had stood on the shelf above the desk and which Oscar used to call, in jest, "the only honest witness in this room".

Maureen did not scream. She made a thin, small sound, like the creak of an old spring, and slid down the doorframe to the floor. Gwendolyn took a step forward, and Edwin, without looking, put out his arm and stopped her.

"Don't," he said. "Don't touch anything in here. Neither of us."

He was surprised at how calm his voice sounded. Inside him something had collapsed — slowly, soundlessly, the way a wall collapses when the water has undermined it. But his hands did not shake. His hands never shook, not even when he sat by Mary's bed on the last night.

He crouched beside Oscar and touched two fingers to his neck, though he knew he would feel nothing. The skin was as cold as the bronze of the statuette.

"He's been gone a while," said Edwin. "Several hours at least. Gwendolyn, run to Mrs Hobbs's, there's a telephone there. Call Constable Doyle and Dr Brenner. Tell them Oscar Renwick has been murdered. Say exactly that — 'murdered'. Otherwise Doyle will finish his tea first."

Gwendolyn nodded. She stood a moment longer, looking at her uncle, and Edwin saw something setting in her grey eyes, so like Oscar's — not tears, not yet. Something hard and cold, like ice on a pond on the first night of frost.

"Someone telephoned me this morning," she said quietly. "At the boarding house. They said I should hurry. Someone knew, Mr Hale."

And she ran out without waiting for an answer.

* * *

Police Constable Percy Doyle arrived twenty minutes later on his bicycle, red from the ride and from the realisation that in eight years of service in Marlow Cross he was, for the first time, going to have to deal with something more serious than stolen chickens and the Christmas fight outside the Crown. He was young — not yet thirty — pink-cheeked, conscientious, and in the habit of writing everything in his notebook, even the weather, because he had once read that this was what real detectives did.

Dr Brenner, a dry, silent man with a bag he seemed to have carried since the Great War, came after him. He knelt beside the body, examined the wound for a long time, lifted Oscar's hand, bent the fingers, touched the jaw.

"A blow to the back of the head," he said at last. "One, very hard. Possibly two. With that." He nodded at the bronze horse without touching it. "Death occurred between ten o'clock last night and midnight. I'll be more precise after the post-mortem. He didn't struggle. I don't think he even had time to turn round."

"So he knew whoever was standing behind him," said Edwin. "He wasn't afraid of him."

Doyle glanced at him with the mild displeasure of a man whose line has just been taken.

"Thank you, Mr Hale. The police will draw the conclusions." He licked his pencil and wrote: 10–12 p.m. Blow from behind. Statuette (horse). Then he looked up. "Right. Who went in first?"

Maureen, whom Edwin had sat on a chair in the passage and given water from the scullery tap, told him everything — quietly, stumbling, going back over it. The bolt. The curtains. Gwendolyn. The hatpin. The lamp under the door. The counter. Her key.

Doyle listened, and his face grew longer and longer.

"Hang on," he said when she had finished. "Hang on. You're saying that this thing," he jabbed his pencil at the brass counter, "shows the door was locked at six o'clock last night and nobody's opened it since?"

"Not 'shows', Constable," Edwin replied. "Guarantees. I made it myself. Every turn of the mechanism — with any key, from either side — turns over a digit for good. You can't wind it back. One thousand four hundred and seventeen is me, yesterday, at six-oh-two. One thousand four hundred and eighteen is Maureen, twenty minutes ago. Between those two numbers there's nothing."

"But he's in there!" Doyle swung round to the room, where Dr Brenner was already drawing over the body a sheet Maureen had fetched from upstairs. "He's lying in there! He must have got in somehow! And so must the killer!"

"Yes," said Edwin. "He must."

Silence settled over the passage. Somewhere in the shop the clocks were ticking — a score of clocks, not one keeping time with another, and all together they sounded like a fine, cold rain.

"Maybe he'd been in there since six?" Doyle tried. "Hid while you were locking up?"

"I locked the room standing on the threshold. It was empty. And Oscar was standing next to me. He saw me to the shop door at twenty past six. Maureen and Gwendolyn left just after. He stayed on alone — alive, in the shop, not in this room."

"The window?"

There was no window in the back room. There was only a narrow ventilation grille right up under the ceiling, behind thick bars, which not even a cat could have squeezed through. Doyle climbed on a chair all the same and tugged at the bars. They were set solid in the stone.

He climbed down, dusted his hands, and opened his notebook again, as if the answer might have appeared in it.

"How many keys to this door?"

"Seven," said Maureen. "One is Mr Renwick's; it hangs on the hook behind the counter. It's hanging there now. The other six belong to six people."

"Names."

Maureen listed them and Doyle wrote them down, and with every name something tightened further in Edwin's chest. Because every name was familiar to him. He had known every one of them for forty years.

"Me," said Maureen. "Mr Hale. Mr Tobias Lane, of William Street — he and Mr Renwick started out in business together once, before the war, and when this lock was fitted Mr Renwick gave him a key in memory of those days. The Reverend Arthur Pembry, our vicar — he and Mr Renwick were at school together. Mrs Helen Frost, the bank manager — the bank lent the shop money when times were hard, and she insisted on security. And Miss Gwendolyn. The key came to her from her mother, Mr Renwick's sister. She died last spring."

"Six," Doyle muttered. "Six people with keys. And not one of them, if this gadget's to be believed, used their key."

"If this gadget's to be believed," Edwin repeated quietly, "no one opened this door at all. Not with a key, not with anything else."

He noticed Doyle slowly turning his eyes towards him. He noticed, and pretended he hadn't.

* * *

By noon Doyle had been round them all. Gwendolyn, who had come back with him, pale but composed, handed over her own key — it was in her handbag, in a small velvet pouch where her mother used to keep it. Edwin's key hung on his old leather cord under his shirt, where it had hung for twenty years.

Tobias Lane opened the door of his shop to the constable in a dressing gown, heard the news with an expression Doyle afterwards described in his notebook as "shocked (?)" — with a question mark — and after a long pause took his key from a safe where, by his account, it had lain "a year, maybe two". The Reverend Pembry, who was preparing for old Mrs Ellington's funeral, went white, sat down on a bench in the vestry, and with trembling fingers took the key from the pocket of his cassock. He always carried it. "Oscar asked me to," was all he said. Helen Frost received the constable in her office at the bank without rising from her desk, listened, twice asked for the time of death, and laid before him the key, which, it turned out, was kept in a safe-deposit box together with the deeds pledged against the shop.

Six keys. Six people. And all six keys in place, with their owners, as if they had never left them for a moment.

In the evening, when the body had been taken away and the shop sealed, Edwin stood on Marlow Street in front of the dark window, in the very spot where he had seen Oscar alive the day before. The fog had lifted, and above the rooftops hung a thin, pale crescent moon, like a nail paring.

Someone stopped beside him. He didn't turn — he knew who it was.

"Are you thinking the same thing I am, Mr Hale?" asked Gwendolyn.

"I'm thinking that yesterday Oscar told me six keys meant six questions. And that he already knew the answer to one of them."

"And he paid for it."

"And he paid for it."

She was silent a moment. Then she said — quietly, without anger, simply stating it, the way one states the weather:

"Constable Doyle asked me who in Marlow Cross knows that lock better than anyone. I told him the truth. I couldn't do otherwise."

Edwin turned to her at last. In the moonlight her face looked very young and very tired.

"You did right, Miss Renwick," he said. "Because it is the truth. I know that lock. I designed it, I built it, I've inspected it twenty times. If anyone in this town can open that door without turning the counter, it's me."

He paused and added, looking at the dark window in which their two figures were reflected:

"Only I don't know how. Which means somebody has learned something even I can't do."